A Good Day, said Nato on 14 May, when it
killed at least 87 ethnic Albanian refugees in the
village of Korisa, and injured a hundred more. What would
constitute a bad day for Nato? The bullish
response was part of an increasingly strident propaganda
campaign in which each new bloody accident is
offset by repeated atrocity stories about the Serbs and
pictures of the plight of refugees.

We do not target civilians, says Nato
spokesman Jamie Shea. Yet it stretches credibility to
describe all Nato attacks on civilians as
accidents. The bombs that hit Nis marketplace
on 3 May, for example, were cluster bombs designed to
kill and maim people with shrapnel, although the stated
target was an airport runway. Similarly, when Nato hit a
bus on 1 May, killing 47 people, was it also an accident
that Nato aircraft returned for a second strike, hitting
an ambulance and injuring medical staff at the scene? It
is certain at least that the attack on the television
building in Belgrade was carried out in the full
knowledge that civilians were inside. Natos
definition of a legitimate military target is
flexible enough to include homes, schools and hospitals.

The catalogue of disastrous accidents
presents a challenge for Nato spin doctors. The protocol
is to start by blaming the Serbs. When US State
Department spokesman James Rubin suggested the refugees
at Korisa may have been hit by Serb shells not Nato
bombs, he was following a procedure established over
civilian bomb damage to Pristina and the bombing of the
Djakovica refugee convoy. Both were initially pinned on
the Serbs in the hope that the first headlines would make
a lasting impression. After promising a thorough
investigation, Nato then admits some culpability,
but continues to hint that the enemy is really to blame.
In the case of Korisa, this was accomplished by claiming
the refugees were being used as human
shields. According to Western reporters at the
scene there was no military target at Korisa. Yet the
Serbs apparently knew the village would be bombed on 14
May and therefore hurried to re-populate it just in time.

This blame-the-enemy strategy was taken to
absurd lengths by Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon, who
suggested the Serbs aim at Korisa was to cause a
public relations disaster for Nato. (Perhaps the cunning
Chinese moved their embassy for the same reason?) British
politicians have also expressed frustration at bad
publicity, adopting a shoot-the-messenger
approach. Prime Minister Tony Blair described his speech
to the Newspaper Society on 10 May as not an attack
on the media. Presumably he meant this in the same
sense that Natos round-the-clock bombing campaign
is not a war. In fact New Labour have
attacked the media from the beginning, portraying John
Simpsons reports as Serbian propaganda, and
denouncing as appeasers those who question
the effectiveness of Nato strategy.

Blair complains that refugee fatigue has
set in, and that journalists are being manipulated by the
Serbs into concentrating too much on the civilian damage
and death caused by Nato action. The opposite is true.
Kosovo has sometimes slipped down the news agenda, but
reports from the refugee centres have featured almost
daily in the news. And although there have been some
high-profile Nato errors, other attacks on civilian
targets have attracted less attention. The TV station in
Novi Sad bombed on 3 May barely merited a mention, and
the hospital hit on 20 May did not make a single front
page. The style of reporting on ethnic Albanian refugees
has been highly emotive, in contrast to the implacable
lack of interest in Serbs fleeing Nato bombs. One BBC
correspondent found he was running out of words to
describe how these people have suffered, except to say
that its cruel, brutal, inhumane and
criminal. He went on to say: its high
time it stopped. Like Blair, some reporters
evidently know that such coverage can be effective
pro-Nato propaganda.

In his Newspaper Society speech, Blair also linked
reporting on refugees to coverage of atrocity stories.
When youve reported one mass rape, the next
ones not so newsworthy he commented
sarcastically, see one mass grave, youve seen
the lot. In fact there has been a constant stream
of atrocity stories, often based on the flimsiest of
evidence. The source for these stories is sometimes Nato
politicians with an obvious interest in manipulating the
news, many of whose claims  that Pristina stadium
was being used as a concentration camp, for example
 have been false.

The other source is refugees themselves, although they
have sometimes proved unreliable witnesses. Even when
told they had been bombed by Nato, survivors of the
attack on the Djakovica convoy blamed the Serbs. From the
viewpoint of ethnic Albanians who welcome Nato action,
such statements are understandable. But it is less
obvious why Western reporters should be determined to
accept them. Channel Four News, for example, reported a
large exodus from Prizren on 29 April, the day after the
town had been heavily bombed by Nato. Yet this was not
even mentioned as a possible reason for the flight of
refugees. Instead, one man was interviewed who thought he
had heard a different kind of explosion in the
early hours and suspected it was Serbian
police shelling a house near him.

The atrocity stories are taken on trust for two
reasons. First, Nato politicians have successfully
demonised the Serbs, who are now portrayed as the new
Nazis, perpetrating genocide and capable of anything.
Although they are under bombardment from up to 700 Nato
sorties a day, we are asked to believe that Serbian
soldiers are simultaneously fighting the Kosovo
Liberation Army, attacking Albania, preparing to
overthrow the Montenegrin government, burning villages,
deporting hundreds of thousands of people, keeping
thousands more as human shields, forcing ethnic Albanian
men to don orange uniforms and dig graves, digging the
bodies up again and moving them, herding boys around as
mobile blood banks, and raping thousands of women. As if
they were not busy enough, we are now told they spend
their time thinking up ways to embarrass Nato.

Secondly, the Bosnian war is cited as a precedent
which lends credibility to current claims. The BBCs
Matt Frei, for example, said there can now be no
doubt that Serbian security forces have been and may
still be involved in the systematic rape of Kosovar
women. We dont know the exact numbers, but if the
Bosnian war, where the same thing happened, is anything
to go by, the victims could be in their thousands.
The claim that more than 50,000 Muslim women were raped
by Serbs in Bosnia is regularly bandied about. Yet a 1993
United Nations commission scaled down to 2,400 victims
 including Serbs and Croats  based on 119
documented cases. Frei also wrote in the Sunday
Telegraph of suspicions that there may be
scores, perhaps hundreds, of rape camps inside Kosovo,
just as there were in Bosnia. Strange, then, that
no one ever found a single rape camp in
Bosnia, and that a member of a European Community team
sent to find such camps in 1992 resigned because the
delegation interviewed only four victims before making
its report that 20,000 women had been raped.

Bosnia is also mentioned to support claims that the
Serbs are exhuming mass graves and moving the bodies to
sites bombed by Nato or areas once occupied by the KLA.
This unlikely story is a chilling development in the
propaganda war, especially when coupled with the
allegation about human shields. As
Natos ever-intensifying and often inaccurate
bombing continues, we can expect the casualties it causes
will all be blamed on the Serbs. Next time, it will be
the experience of Kosovo which is cited as the
proof to support claims of enemy atrocities.